An extract from her book
"Seven Days: Tales of Magic, Sex and Gender."

"Life gives naught but itself and
takes naught but from itself.

Love possesses not nor would it
be possessed;

For love is sufficient unto
love.

When you love you should not say,
"God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of
God."

And think not you can direct the
course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your
course...

But if you love and must needs
have desires,

let these be your
desires;

To melt and be like a running
brook that sings its melody to the night." (Gibran )

Gibran wrote with an ancient
Lebanese Middle-Eastern understanding that human love unites us with
the very spirit of the Divine, that when we love, we are "in the
heart of God." This concept is as old as the human spirit. In ancient
rites of pre-Christian times as well as in many ancient cultures that
have survived, the wedding of humans was a sacred image of the
wedding of Deity and Earth, of the Oneness that love creates, uniting
Divinity and Matter. The cycle of the year, the crops, the pups, the
foals - all were seen as dependent on and part of the creative energy
of the Creating Spirits, Deities or Ancestors.

Early Christian documents recorded
similar thinking about marriage. They spoke of it as a symbol of the
oneness between Christ and His people. "Husbands love your wives, as
Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her... Even so
husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves
his wife loves himself... For this reason a man shall leave his
father and mother and be joined to his wife and he two shall become
one flesh.." Ephesians, 5/22-32 The God and his people become one,
women and men likewise become one.

This text also embodied an ancient
concept of the God having to die that we have life, just as the wheat
must die that we live - a mystery the Greeks celebrated in the
Eleusian Mysteries.

But "one flesh"? The anti-flesh,
the anti-women faction of the early church must have been deaf to
this verse. They could not easily reconcile it with their belief that
the flesh had been corrupted by the Fall - and so they concentrated
on other biblical texts that they could make fit better.

They twisted Paul's chauvinism
making it much worse. Letters written after Paul's death were quoted
as if from him (and still are). But those that are still thought of
as authored by him were misinterpreted. "Wives be subject to your
husband ", Ephesians 5/22 ,is quoted, ignoring the adjacent clause,
"be subject to each other."

Some quoted Paul's first letter to
the Corinthians, 7/25 which said "do not marry". But Paul in the same
chapter emphasised that Jesus had not say any such thing. "Now
concerning the unmarried, I have no command of the Lord." I Cor 7/25.
Because he was convinced that the world was about to end, Paul's
personal opinion was that it was better to avoid marrying in such
circumstances. He however ended with this instruction to those who
were already married: "do not refuse each other except perhaps by
agreement for a season that you may devote yourselves to prayer.. but
then come together again." There is no hint here that he believed
that sexual relations were not entirely good.

St Augustine misinterpreted a
saying of Jesus about the need for couples to stay together. The
apostles had protested to Jesus against this saying of his, saying
that if one could not divorce, it was better not to marry. Jesus then
conceded "not all men can receive this" adding "I say this by way of
concession". His response applied to his statement about divorce, but
Augustine took it as if Jesus had endorsed the view of the apostles
that it was better not to marry.

St Jerome went ever further than
Augustine. In translating the Bible into Latin, creating the Vulgate
version that would be used for centuries, it seems he deliberately
doctored the text to make it advocate celibacy - when in fact it held
that marriage was most sacred. He dropped from Tobias a verse that
said "it is not good for a man to be alone" p12Eu Jerome
fundamentally set himself against St Paul by teaching that sex in
marriage intrinsically dishonours those who take part. "If we abstain
from coitus we honour our wives; if we do not abstain, - well what is
the opposite of honour but insult?" (Adversus Jovianian 1/7}

It is worrying to think that it
was this same Jerome who was asked by Pope Damascus in 382 C.E. to
revise the Latin Gospels and who went on to revise the rest of the
Christian bible. The Emperor Constantine sixty years earlier, in 322
C.E., had given Eusebius of Caesarea, an enemy of the gnostic
Christians, the task of selecting which books went into the New
Testament as we have seen. (Xref tues) Jerome was now given the sole
responsibility for revising the text of the selected books. His
version would be that accepted in the Western Christian world until
modern times. Scholars have remarked that the whole of the New
Testament has Jerome's style. (Cambridge History of the Bible Vol 2 p
84). Jerome in a preface addressed to Pope Damascus said: "You asked
me to revise the Old Latin version and , as it were, to sit in
judgment on the corpus of the Scriptures which are now scattered
throughout the whole world, and in as much as they differ from each
other, you would have me decide which of them agreed with the Greek
original ... for there are almost as many texts as there are copies."
The Eastern Christian Churches never fully accepted Jerome's version
and there are remained small differences between these Churches as to
what books made up the New Testament until today.

The Fathers of the Church did not
go quite so far as to say that marriage was evil. They saw it as a
regrettable but necessary for a highly dangerous and potentially
spiritually lethal activity. Sex was so dangerous that it should only
be employed for the procreation of children and never for pleasure.
Ambrose, the teacher of Augustine, praised marriage for its
usefulness - but said "virginity is the one thing that keeps us from
the beasts."

There were women who welcomed this
advocacy of celibacy for many found male demands on them were
arrogant and controlling. In virginity one could seize back control
of one's life by banishing men from it. Even in 1999 a survey among
young adult American women found that a large percentage found
intercourse painful

When St. Augustine had become a
Christian at the age of 29, he deserted the women with whom he had
been for 12 years and by whom he had a child. In his book "De
Genesisi ad litteram", written around 415AD, he said there must have
been sex in the Garden of Eden for what else were woman created for,
for what else were they good for? "I don't see what sort of help
woman was created to provide man with, if one excludes the purpose of
procreation. If woman is not given to man for help in bearing
children, for what help could she be? To till the earth together? If
help were needed for that, man would have been a better help for man.
The same goes for comfort in solitude."

The influence of Augustine sadly
reached through nearly a thousand years to influence Thomas Aquinas
who taught that marriage was the least of the sacraments and then
reached on for another few hundred years more to Martin Luther and
Calvin. Luther wrote. "No matter what praise is given to marriage, I
will not concede it to nature that it is no sin... How foul and
horrible a thing sin is, for lust is the only thing that cannot be
cured by any remedy! Not even by marriage, which was expressly
ordained for this infirmity of our nature." Commentary on Genesis 3/9 Luther 103 He also wrote: "A woman is never truly her
own master. God formed her body to belong to a man, to have and to
rear children."

But in the New Testament there is
no suggestion that sex in marriage is only permitted for the
generation of children. Marriage was seen as good in its own right, a
sacred symbol of a bonding of God with life, of Christ with the
Church - and the apostles showed no sign of shame in travelling with
their wives. This was the common understanding in a society which
glorified the family as did Judaism - and in most of the surrounding
Greek and Egyptian religions which celebrated the "sacred marriage".
The Gnostic Christians taught that "the bridal chamber" was sacred
and reflected the union of human and divine. Their views were far
from those that Augustine and Martin Luther taught in Christ's
name.